The little creatures seem to find the most unexpected places to build their nests. Inside shoes. Atop car tires. On Christmas light wires. (I hate when people leave their holiday decorations up for months, but I’ll give you a pass if there are birds nesting on yours.)

Cornell Lab of Ornithology's Celebrate Urban Birds project is challenging people to find the oddest, cutest, most amazing bird nests in its annual Funky Nests in Funky Places competition. It’s urging people of all ages to search their neighborhoods for nests and document them in photos, videos, artwork, poems or stories.

Prizes are on the line, including binoculars, bird feeders, DVDs and more.

If you’ve never seen the crabapple trees at their peak, you’re missing a visual treat. The arboretum, on the campus of the Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center, has probably hundreds of the trees. They wash the grounds in pink and white when their flowers are open.

Today’s warmth is pushing the crabapples toward their flowering, said Ken Cochran, the arboretum’s program director. He guesses most will be in bloom by Monday, but the show should be pretty good by Sunday, when more people are off work and can visit.

They’re left with leaves that have turned yellow or almost white -- not a good look when your boxwoods are supposed to be glossy green or, in the case of the shrubs in front of my house, a pretty variegated green and gold.

In many cases the cause is winter burn, a condition that damages and dries out the plants. But in others, the blame rests on voles nibbling at the base of the shrubs.

Either way, your plants need to be pruned or (sorry to be the bearer of bad tidings) possibly replaced.

I’m just back from a thrift-shopping class at Goodwill Industries. Yeah, I know. Like I need any more encouragement to shop at thrift stores.

I’ll share the pointers I picked up in Saturday’s Beacon Journal, but in the meantime, I wanted to pass along this great bit of information I learned: Goodwill accepts donations of computers and other non-working electronic items.

In looking through the book in preparation for that story, my eyes had been drawn to a photo of a lovely young woman named Dana with a tattoo of wildflowers on her back. I’m not a particular fan of large tattoos, but this one was delicate and different. I read the caption and discovered it was a tribute to Dana’s mother and “a wonderful reminder of the connection all humans have with the wild.”